Globe-Jungle Project

"Globe-Jungle" (2002) is an installation by Yashuhiro Suzuki. It was shown at DEAF03.

Yasuhiro Suzuki: Globe Jungle (night)

Suzuki’s interactive installation Globe-Jungle consists of a revolving
climbing frame where children can play during the daytime.
A video camera records their play and the images are projected
onto the bars of the globe at night. By spinning the frame
the bars form a surface and the projections become visible.
This produces a nostalgic illusion that stimulates the memory
and senses of the spectators.

In a society where technology is pervasive, physical
exercise is often neglected. Globe-Jungle Project, an installation
by the Japanese artist Yasuhiro Suzuki, brings back memories
of the sheer pleasure of playing outside. A ‘Globe-Jungle’
is a circular climbing frame from Japan that was very popular
there in the past few decades. Suzuki’s truly interactive
installation of the same name uses the energy of children
playing in the daytime to stimulate the memory and senses
of visitors at night. Globe-Jungle Project is part of a
larger project in Japan for redesigning city parks, aimed
at promoting contacts between the young and the old. This
theme also occurs in the projected images of playing children
on the globe and of grown-ups around it.

Globe-Jungle
Project consists of a rotating climbing frame with a diameter
of 1.5 meters, where children can play during the daytime.
One video camera records their play, while another records
their immediate surroundings from inside the ‘globe’. These
two perspectives of the globe constitute the daytime images
archive. After sundown, this archive is projected onto the
bars of the globe. By spinning the frame the bars become
a surface reflecting the images. Afterimages on the visitor’s
retina create the actual image, just like cinema, where
the sequence of 24 individual still images per second create
the illusion of a moving image. A carousel of imagination
and emotions is thus set in motion and the day’s collective
memory coincides with the childhood recollections of the
visitor.

A nostalgic illusion is created where the
present and past of the visitor, day and night of the surroundings
and the inside and outside of the playground instrument
fade into each other. Echoes from the past are given their
meaning only by motion in the present: the faster the globe
spins, the better we see our past, until the globe is as
round as our image of the Earth.

Globe-Jungle Project
received an honorary mention in the section ‘Interactive
Art’ at the Prix Ars Electronica of 2002.

The Globe Jungle installation has found a new location in the public space after DEAF03: Rotterdam's "family meeting point" in the Public Library. There, on the second floor, kids (and their families) can play in a spherical, globe-like framework that may look like a familiar playing object, but carries a certain mystery. A video camera records the children while they play during the daytime, and these images are projected onto the bars of the globe in the evening. By spinning the frame the bars form a surface and the projections become visible. This produces a nostalgic illusion in which past and present, day and night, inside and outside fade into each other.